Kitchen and Dining Room

​​"Tell me what thou eatest, and I will tell thee what thou art." —Brillat Savarin, quoted by Smith, Mary Riley. "The Influence of the Kitchen." Good Housekeeping, June 26, 1886. p. 93.

Everyday items around the kitchen and dining room

Victorian refrigerator / iceboxCirca early 20th-century.

We bought our antique ice box when we first moved to Port Townsend in 2010 and it was always our plan to use it for its intended purpose. Concept and execution are two separate things, and admittedly it took us a while to buckle down to the idea. When we bought our house there was a rather decrepit-seeming electric refrigerator in the kitchen; we reasoned that we would let the appliance die a natural death and then switch over to the ice box which was far more in keeping with our philosophies of historical living. (Incidentally, the term ice box was rarely used in the nineteenth-century. The special cabinet which now usually goes by that name was simply called a refrigerator. "Ice box" existed as a phrase, but until the early twentieth-century it was the exception rather than the rule in common parlance. When electric refrigerators started usurping the old name of refrigerator, ice box stepped up to fill the linguistic gap. We do generally refer to our food storage cabinet as an ice box though, just to avoid a lengthy explanation to anyone outside our home.Here's an interesting article about the terminology: http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2013/12/iceboxes-vs-refrigerators.html)

For further details about iceboxes in general—and ours in particular—check out Sarah's book This Victorian Life!

As we settled into our Victorian home, we grew increasingly frustrated with the electric fridge's steadfast refusal to die. After a few years of glaring at the anachronistic behemoth looming over our kitchen, we decided to stop waiting and make the switch over to the ice box regardless of the electric fridge's health. Port Townsend had its own ice works in 1891[1], and most urban dwellers in America during the Victorian period had ice delivered right to their door. Sadly this is no longer an option, so we had to work out a system where Gabriel buys block ice from one of the few stores in our region that still sells it, transports it home in a cooler, then Sarah rushes out and help him unload it before it melts. We started by moving over the condiments, since most of them probably could have sat on our cupboard shelves without any refrigeration at all and been relatively unaffected. The vegetables came next, since they were also relatively shelf stable. A week or so later we moved the eggs, cheese and butter. Seeing no signs of food poisoning after another few weeks we finally moved over the liquid dairy products (milk and cream) and Gabriel's meats. With that, we unplugged the electric refrigerator and awaited developments. When we had been getting along just fine with the ice box alone, we sold the electric fridge. Our milk is actually colder this way than when we were using an electric fridge because we put it (and the meat) right in the same compartment as the ice.

Meltwater collects in a drip tray underneath the wooden cabinet as the ice diminishes, and Sarah empties the tray twice a day. In the summer the ice melts faster than in the winter, needing to be replaced three times a week instead of twice a week. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the ice that was delivered straight to people's doors would have melted a lot moreslowly than the ice we can buy. Why? Because in the days when ice boxes were common, ice works froze their ice to a much lower temperature than they do now, and they were more careful about how they transported it. (We've actually seen entire cartfuls of ice in grocery stores sitting OUTSIDE the freezer waiting to be put away, with no store employees in sight. Once when Sarah showed a store employee a bag of ice that had liquid meltwater in the bottom and asked if they had anything better in the back, the clerk just shrugged and said, "That's all we got." (Implication: Take it or leave it.")

The colder ice which was available to Victorians and early Edwardians is called hard ice and refrigerated an ice box for an entire week. The warmer ice (which is all we can buy now) is called soft ice. Some places—especially places with large Amish communities—still have hard ice available, but unlike with fabric or certain antiques, we can't just order ice through the mail!

Someone once asked us if the meltwater could be reused.
The answer is "Technically maybe; in practical
terms no." The meltwater is
not potable. It exits the ice compartment through a metal tube a little smaller
than a garden hose and as it drains down to the drip tray it picks up rust and
similar contaminants from the tube. If we lived somewhere like Arizona where
drought is a major issue we could probably use it in the garden, but the tray
is extremely heavy and unwieldy when it's full. (After all, it contains the
meltwater from anywhere from ten to twenty pounds of ice, depending on how fast
it's melting! That's a lot of water to move around in a shallow, open container
without spilling it.) It's hard enough to move it from the bottom of the ice
box to the sink without making a mess; carrying it all the way to an irrigation
barrel without creating a minor tsunami would be challenging to say the least. Trying to accomplish it twice a day
might put a person's sanity on trial.

We had been using our icebox regularly for about half a year when it occurred to Sarah that the appliance would have truly interesting potential as a component in a detective story. We do consulting for films and books, and one of our favorite projects so far has been an ongoing mystery series set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, A Person Known to Me. One morning after she emptied the drip tray Sarah wrote to the series' directors with some insights into how an ice box could fit into their piece. She pointed out that the water in the drip tray would give a detective an outside estimate for the amount of time that had passed since a vanished person had last been in their house and caring about mundane tasks. If someone's ice compartment was full and they suddenly disappeared, the meltwater in the drip tray would overflow onto the floor sometime the next day. (In the nineteenth-century some houses had drains through the floor directly from the icebox to the outer world, but this was fairly uncommon.) If the ice was completely melted a good detective would probably check the temperature of the water in the drip tray to see how warm it had gotten, the same way he/she would check the temperature of coffee or tea in a mug left on the table to see how cold that had gotten.

An icebox could come into detective plots in another interesting way as well: Back when ice was delivered, icemen had an interesting role in the community because they made regular deliveries and (unlike the postman or milkman) could actually carry their product right into the house - not necessarily in every case, but certainly if it was a heavy delivery and the woman asked him to. (Our house actually has a separate door directly into the kitchen for deliveries.) Because icemen were muscular, knew all their women customers well and came into the house, there were lots of bawdy jokes about them.) An iceman would be in a unique position to tell detectives if anything was changed or out of the ordinary in a particular kitchen - he would be somewhat familiar with his customer's kitchens, but would have a more neutral perspective than a member of the family.

Because ice boxes and kitchens in general were solidly in women's sphere of technology, a lady detective would think of these things before a male detective did. She would also probably think of interviewing the iceman before it occurred to the male detectives. The iceman would be less suspicious of a lady detective too; since there were so many bawdy jokes about icemen and private detectives were often hired to dig up dirt in divorce / annulment cases, the iceman would probably be immediately on the defensive with a male detective.

The blocks of ice are large (the biggest we can get are 10 lb blocks, but they would have used even bigger ones when it was delivered by icemen. Our ice compartment holds up to 80 lbs; some iceboxes were bigger, some smaller). Every once in a while, there will be a loud CLUNK as the melting of a lower block causes an upper block to fall off of it and shift around. It can be quite startling in an otherwise perfectly quiet house. This morning before sun-up Sarah was at her desk writing when she heard a loud BANG from the kitchen. She'd been reading lots of spooky stories lately and her first instantaneous thought was, "Ghost!" then after a split-second of reflection she realized that it was only the ice shifting in the icebox.

The liquid acts as a heat sink, so the handle stays cool enough to pick it up without needing any sort of cloth or pad. (If I were to leave the cup on the stove so long that the handle got hot, the prolonged heat would ruin the flavor of the coffee anyway so the handle temperature would be a bit of a moot point.)

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Waffle iron.The designs on our waffle iron are card suits: hearts, clubs and diamonds.The waffle iron was designed to fit right in one of the stove eyes; to use it we take out the round lid and put the waffle iron right in the hole. A number of different 19th-century cooking implements were designed to work this way; the stoves and the implements had to be sized to fit each other. Our stove is a size 7, so implements with a 7 stamped on them fit into its eyes.

One of these pictures shows how it just takes a light tap on the waffle iron to flip it over so the other side of the waffle will cook. After we procurred this waffle iron and started using it, Gabriel said he now had a much better understanding of the term "waffling" (as in flip-flopping)!

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Cast iron wall-mounted match safe, 1863Gabriel's Grandma Catherine gave this to Sarah as a birthday present; it's an heirloom from her family. The date stamped on it is March 12, 1863: Sarah's birthday, 117 years before she was born!The match safe is textured on its bottom to provide an easy striking surface for matches.***​

Food grinder (1905)​and an advertisement for the same tool from a different company, 1893.​***

Egg beater, 1905Every kitchen, Victorian or modern, should have one of these! It takes far less space than an electric mixer, makes less noise, and doesn't use any electricity. With all those benefits, it still beats eggs and whips cream just as fast as an electric mixer!

For optimal whipping it's best to have both the cream and the bowl as cold as possible. I keep our cream in with the ice in our icebox, and if I think ahead before whipping it I'll put the bowl in on the ice as well. Heavy cream whips much faster than light whipping cream, and there is also variation between brands —some whip better than others due to differing fat percentages in the cream. As a general rule cheap brands of cream are good enough for soups but rubbish for whipping: the reason they can be cheaper is that more of the butterfat is removed from them and sold in other products, but the fat is precisely what allows cream to hold air when it's whipped.***​

Chalkboard"A slate hung up in the kitchen is a splendid thing, if you make use of it. Set down when you put your bread in the oven, so as to know just when to take it out. When you get out of any groceries, set it down, then you will not forget it." —Cook, Mrs. Kate. The Chautauqua Cook-Book, 1896. p. 147​​***​

Cast iron pansThese are heirlooms handed down to Sarah from her great-grandmother - and they still work great!***​

Single-serving coffee pot, 1890s.​***

Milk jug: Circa 1890's​***

Egg cup***

Tea-pot (circa 1890s): An anniversary gift from Gabriel to Sarah on their 9th wedding anniversary. This sturdy, "ironstone" teapot is typical of lower-middleclass Victorian homes. The flower is a moss-rose, which in the Victorian language of flowers signified voluptuousness.***​

Historic picture of a cruet set, 1893. From Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.

Pickle castor (circa lat 1880's), with close ups of its owl and hummingbird ornaments.

Ceramic pitcher, circa late 1880's / early 1890's.This pitcher demonstrates the Aesthetic Movement style of art which was popular in the late Victorian era. The orchids symbolize "a beautiful lady" in the Victorian language of flowers.***​

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For more fun information related to food, check out these portions of the website:

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